Welcome to News From Indian Country

Center/museum nearing completion at LCO College by Jim Bailey Reserve, Wisconsin (OA)
The LCO Development Corporation is busy putting the final touches on a handsome new building attached to the Ojibwa band’s college in northwest Wisconsin. The 9,900 square-foot structure consists of a climate-controlled basement archive storage room, a first-floor display hall, and a circular, 36 foot-tall four-season gathering room. It is sided with cedar, and around the upper perimeter of the tower-like gathering room there is a red and white woodland floral design chosen by a committee, said Ann Marie Penzkover, Dean of Student Services of the LCO college. According to the college’s president, Schuyler Houser, the facility will be used to house temporary traveling displays of cultural artifacts and for seminars or classes on topics like moccasin making and memory quilts. “It will be a living culture center where we will focus on tasks such as genealogy research and language preservation,” said Houser. Completion is scheduled for around February 15. Planning for the structure began in 1999 following the passage of the Native American Graves Repatriation act, which ordered the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to return certain classes of artifacts to tribes from whom they were originally taken. As a part of the agreement to receive the returned artifacts, the cultural center’s basement is a specially designed, environmentally-controlled area where the historical materials are to be restored and housed. Planning for the new facility began in 1999. Excavation commenced in the summer of 2001, followed by the placement of the foundation and footings that winter. The American Indian College Fund has underwritten the $1.2 million required to build the structure. The general contractor, LCO Development Corporation, is an independent corporation that was formed in 1972-73 to meet the LCO Band’s construction needs.		Some of the Development Corporation’s other recent projects have included Pineview Funeral Service and Indian Country’s Trading Post. The construction foreman for the cultural center/museum project has been Rick Rooney, owner of Migizi General Contracting. The LCO Development Corporation is triballyowned and, with up to 38 seasonal employees, is a major trainer and employer of construction workers at the northwestern Wisconsin Anishinaabe tribe’s reservation. The construction corporation’s next major project will be to complete the installation of centralized water and sewage treatment facilities that will serve everything at Lac Courte Oreilles from the casino on down to individual homes. Projected to cost around $1 million, the system will replace a hodge-podge of aging individual wells and septic systems that pervade the 70,000- acre Ojibwa reservation. The Development Corporation has recently undergone a major reorganization, scaling back from approximately 90 employees to the current number of around three dozen. With an annual budget of approximately $2 million, the organization is now operating in the black for the first time according to company officials. The Lac Courte Oreilles Development Corporation also does work outside of their home territory, and seeks to bid on any construction project within a 150 mile radius. They also occasionally rent out their heavy equipment to other construction companies who need to supplement their own roster of equipment.